The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(2)

When it comes to epigenetics, the transmission of trauma makes headlines because its manifest symptoms are more easily observed and reported. But the hopeless romantic in me couldn’t help but wonder if other things are passed down genetically, like stratums of empathy, levels of limerence, and even the capacity (or incapacity) for love.

The more you think about it, if the genetic circuitry of trauma is intertwined with the genetic circuitry of wellness, together they form an intergenerational feedback loop. Where a parent’s output is used as input for a child’s future behavior. And while there is the latent possibility of cycles repeating themselves, if we understand who and where we came from, genetic destinies can be altered, hopefully for the better.

Or to put it in classic rock terms. If Van Halen’s albums were generations, the first generation’s songs were “Ain’t Talkin’?’bout Love,” but six or seven generations later it was all “When It’s Love,” “Why Can’t This Be Love,” and “Love Walks In.”

Don’t get me started on “Jamie’s Cryin’.”





Act I





1 Faye




(1942)

Faye Moy signed a contract stating that she would never marry. That’s what the American Volunteer Group had required of all female recruits. Though as she sat in the bar of the Kunming Tennis Club, Faye thought that perhaps there should have been an exception made for older nurses. Not that she had any immediate prospects among the thirty young officers who made up the Flying Tigers. It was just that a notarized statement of marital exclusion seemed to hammer home the fact that she’d never been in love. She’d come close once, back in her village near Canton, amid the wilted lilies of her youth. Since then she’d felt many things for many people, but always more yearning than devotion, more appreciation than passion. There had even been an awkwardly arranged marriage proposal a lifetime ago, at the Tou Tou Koi restaurant, where a dashing young man got down on one knee, with a ring, and too much pomade in his hair.

Wasted. That’s what her father said when she turned him down. “Fei-jin? Why do you have to be this way? No one likes a stubborn girl.”

She’d tried not to roll her eyes. “Why can’t you call me Faye like everyone else?”

“Because I’m not everyone else. Look at you. You’re not getting any younger. You should be happy someone still wants you at your age.”

She’d been twenty-seven.

But as much as Faye had wanted to share her life with someone, to watch a sunset in the arms of somebody who wouldn’t leave before sunrise, even then she knew that want was not the same as need. She’d refused to settle for convenience, or to abet her aching loneliness. She went to Lingnan University instead. She told herself that if she stopped looking, eventually the right person would come along.

That was decades ago.

Now she felt like the jigsaw puzzle of her life had long been completed, the picture looked whole, but there was one piece missing.

That’s my heart, Faye thought, something extra, unnecessary.

Now well into her fifties, Faye still couldn’t forget how in nursing school, Chinese mothers used to point at her as she walked down the street in the evening. They’d turn to their daughters and say, “Don’t be disobedient or you’ll end up like her,” or “That’s what happens when you’re too proud—too foolish. No one wants you.” Faye would pretend she didn’t hear. Then she’d run home and curl up in bed, crying herself to sleep. In the morning, she’d light a Chesterfield and stare at the tobacco-stained ceiling, aching inside, as tendrils of smoke drifted upward like unanswered prayers.

To her parents and those mothers on the street, Faye was mei fan neoi zi. Though she didn’t feel like an old maid. Even after she arrived in Kunming, where she was twice the age of the American nurses who followed. On the bustling streets of Kunming, Faye was treated differently. Perhaps because she’d served longer and now hardly noticed the suffocating humidity of typhoon season. Or because she didn’t scream when field rats crawled their way into her dresser and chewed the buttons off her clothing. Conceivably it was because she was fluent in English thanks to Lai King, her American-born mother, and could quote poetry by Li Bai as well as Gertrude Stein and Oscar Wilde, yet also spend an entire afternoon playing canasta and whist while drinking tiger balms and not let the rum cocktails make her sick for days. Faye learned early on to avoid not only the whiskey the natives made, but especially the gin concocted by Jesuit missionaries.

“You want another?” Faye shook her glass tumbler.

Lois, the latest nursing recruit, a comely blonde from Topeka, looked back, bleary eyed. “Am I supposed to say yes? What is this, some kind of initiation?”

Faye noticed that Lois was slurring her words, so she peered over the recruit’s shoulder and made eye contact with the bartender. Faye shook her head, almost imperceptibly so Lois wouldn’t catch on, then nodded as the barkeep put his bottle away.

“I don’t know why everyone around here drinks so much,” Lois said, waving broadly at everyone in the club. “And why do they have to play such sad music?”

Faye listened to the jukebox as Frank Sinatra sang “I’ll Never Smile Again.” She thought about the flashes of light on the horizon each night, the peals of thunder. Followed by the rumble of pony carts on cobbled streets in the morning and the wailing of widows as refugees flooded through the city’s arched gates.